#which is funny because i can hardly form a coherent sentence without accidentally using two metaphors

[lindwurmkai]

who's up for another round of tumblr user lindwurmkai criticising what other people are complaining about? 👉😏👉

no but for real tho. there is a whole, idk, phenomenon i often encounter on here where being rightfully exasperated with certain "popular" behaviours (example: wanting a "canon" answer for every question you have about a piece of media) turns into condescending mockery of anyone who ever behaves that way and treating it like it's completely bizarre when in fact it can simply be an expression of autism.

which makes it all the more puzzling when i see a dozen fellow autistics reblog the post, too. (this was not directly inspired by whoever last put a similar post on my dash btw. i've been meaning to write this for days)

another example is "the curtains are just blue" but i've talked about that before. and struggling to understand that fiction follows different rules than real life!! plus several other aspects of "basic media literacy" that can actually be quite difficult to grasp for a lot of people.

"why does it even matter if something is canon or not? why do you need a wiki for everything? who cares what the character's 'real' favourite colour is?" maybe because to some people, learning fun facts about wizards or dragons isn't fundamentally different than learning fun facts about trains or dinosaurs. i'm not saying we don't understand that they're fictional, but that the desire to find out more is the same. and speaking from personal experience, it never even occurred to me that authors who didn't care about the details of their worlds and characters beyond what was in the story might exist until i literally learned about it on tumblr in my 20s. i understood that tolkien was a bit of an outlier but assumed it was just a matter of degree.

people always blame mega franchises and cinemasins or occasionally the american school system for some reason. or social media. and it's probably true that each of those things have contributed to an increase in certain behaviours that you may find annoying! it's definitely true that certain franchises have contributed to a shift in the average person's default assumptions regarding new media they come across. so i completely understand where the exasperation comes from, don't worry

but this is like the difference between criticising fandom trends and criticising individual fans' preferences all over again, except worse because this time it's ableist. you would not believe the things i didn't understand about fiction a decade ago, and a decade ago i was already 27. seeing people get condescended to for the same misunderstandings when some of them are even younger really sucks.

it is possible for the same behaviour to have more than one cause. maybe that one person really watched too much cinemasins while another doesn't even know what that is and yet analyses media the same way because it's how their brain approaches fiction intuitively. maybe one person didn't pay attention in english class while another tried so, so hard to understand the material and still couldn't. maybe one person thinks there's a canon answer to everything because that's what their two previous favourite franchises were like while another is simply applying the "gathering dinosaur facts" approach to fiction and has yet to realise not every author operates like tolkien.

for a long time i couldn't distinguish between plot-relevant details and extra fluff because to me the point of a story was to introduce me to a new world with fun new characters in it. of course 3 pages of infodumping wasn't a problem! of course the character's hair colour was important! the idea of authors answering questions with "it doesn't matter, feel free to imagine whatever you want" would have confused me so much if i had encountered it back then. i already knew how to invent my own stories, but i wanted to know more about this story???

just because i've (mostly) figured it all out now doesn't mean i don't remember being that person everyone loves to mock these days.